The National Development Council circulated a draft procurement annex that would require vendors to label any generative-AI assistance used while preparing government bids, starting with Digital Ministry tenders above NT$10 million. Contractors must list model families, training-data sources at a high level, and whether outputs were human-reviewed before submission.
Problem the rule targets
Taiwan agencies increasingly receive polished technical volumes that read uniformly fluent yet cite statistics that do not appear in attached evidence. Audit teams lack a standard way to ask whether a paragraph came from a large language model trained on copyrighted manuals or from engineers with security clearances. The NDC draft creates a checkbox matrix agencies can paste into Requests for Proposal.
Officials stressed the rule is not a ban on AI drafting; it is a transparency requirement akin to conflict-of-interest disclosures. Bids that omit labels could be disqualified during administrative review before price scoring begins.
Scope and pilot agencies
The first pilot covers cloud migration, cybersecurity operations center upgrades, and citizen-service chatbots—categories where vendors already market “AI copilots.” Ministries of education and health would join in phase two if the Legislative Yuan passes accompanying amendments to the Government Procurement Act guidelines.
Industry reaction
Taiwan systems integrators said labeling is manageable but want a safe-harbor sentence when teams only use AI for grammar. Foreign cloud providers asked whether global models hosted outside Taiwan must disclose training corpora they cannot fully enumerate. NDC lawyers responded that vendors should disclose what they reasonably know, not exhaustive data manifests.
Link to trust and security
The move parallels MODA warnings about phishing pages that mimic government portals. If contractors hide AI-generated security architecture diagrams, red teams cannot reproduce claimed controls. Disclosure gives agency CISOs a hook to demand reproducibility tests during contract negotiation.
Timeline
Comments on the draft close in mid-October, with templates ready before year-end budget tenders. For Taipei readers, the practical effect is more paperwork on big IT deals—and fewer surprises when audit committees ask how a winning bid was written.
Vendor workshops
The NDC will host October workshops for SMEs that bid on municipal chatbot contracts, walking through sample disclosure forms so smaller firms are not disqualified on formatting errors alone.